“It’s not—” Ben began, but Sherazi held up her hand.
“Listen for a minute,” she said, quietly. “I know about you. Probably more than you realise, and some of it is because you’re not as good at hiding things as you think you are. For example: you are a twitchy, watery-eyed nerve that walks as a man, and you panic before there is due cause. You need to sort that out, and I don’t mean by sticking your fingers down your throat after lunch.”
Ben stared at her, horrified.
“People can hear you,” Sherazi said, baldly. “You have broken blood vessels in your cheeks, your teeth have had a lot of work on them, and your fingers have acid burns around the nails. I’m not stupid.” She took a sip of coffee, apparently waiting for Ben to protest, but he couldn’t find anything to say. “However,” Sherazi went on, “how you choose to deal with your fucked-up-ness isn’t really my business. Most people in this field are mental one way or another: as long as it doesn’t stop you working, no one gives a shit. However.”
Ben gave some determined attention to the table top.
“However,” Sherazi repeated, “even if you’re throwing up all the fucking way, do not let your hyperactive…fear gland or whatever it is…get the better of your judgement. You’re a horrible cocktail of caution and recklessness at the wrong moments, Mr Martin, so maybe try asking before you publish and not backing down while investigating, mm?”
She tapped her fingers on the table next to her coffee cup.
“If you really have found something, if you think you’re onto something sizeable, stick with it.”
“McNae’s,” said Ben, weakly, at last.
“Worry about the legal issues after,” said Sherazi, tipping her cup towards him. “Don’t repeat that in class, please, Chantelle’s hard enough to keep out of prison. I don’t mean publish and be damned, most places won’t do that and if they do — well, you’re freelance right now and there’s no one to protect you. It’ll be messy.”
Ben, who felt that something was required of him at this point, nodded his understanding and tried not to choke.
“Seek legal advice if you need it,” said Sherazi, more softly. “I can put you in touch with a lawyer if that becomes necessary. But do not let anything short of your death or an actual volcano in front of you stop you from investigating if you really think you have something, because this could so easily make your career.”
“Uh,” said Ben, even more weakly, “with regards to my death…”
“I spent twenty years in active war zones,” said Sherazi, politely, as if Ben could have ever possibly have forgotten this. “Part of this job is courage. A large part. The other large parts are pig-headedness and remembering to keep your notes somewhere safe.” She got up. “Your research skills are Distinction-worthy — everyone expected that, given where you came from. And, like I said, I might be forced to part with a Merit if you manage to make your writing samples more readable.” She opened the door. “But you have got to be braver and more persistent if you want to get into this career.”
Ben got up. Sherazi waited for him to pass through the door before her.
“Or,” she added, locking it, “if you want to get on in life at all.”
He hadn’t been intending to return to the library, but the cafeteria was full of afternoon-class mums collecting coffee before they left, and it was bucketing down outside, which left his options limited to the library or hanging around in the toilets like some kind of weirdo.
He spotted Tasneen guarding one of the power sockets like a black-clad dragon, an appearance enhanced by the scale-mail-effect jeans she’d got on. He hastened over.
“Alright?”
“No,” said Tasneen, taking him somewhat by surprise.
“Er,” said Ben, backing up a little. “Anything I can do?”
“Yeah,” said Tasneen, climbing onto the table and sitting cross-legged. “Listen to me bitch about this and make appropriate sympathetic noises because literally everyone else is too far up their own arse to say anything at the moment and I’m going to fucking scream in a minute.”
“SHUT UP THOUGH,” said a girl from behind the bookshelves to their right.
“Fuck you,” Tasneen suggested.
“So,” Ben said guiltily, trying not to think that he’d come to find her so that he could complain about Sherazi. “What’s up?”
“Right,” said Tasneen. “The thing is, my best mate Aliyaah just got kicked out of home because her dad is mental. He’s gone properly off on one and was talking about sending her back to live with her auntie and she was like no, fuck you, that’s not how this is going to go, I am not your property.”
“Right,” said Ben.
“So obviously I said she could stay with us, and my mum was like yeah that’s okay, but now she’s like oh I thought it was just until Aliyaah sees sense, and I was like oh are you gonna send me off to live with my auntie next time I say something you don’t like, is that it,” Tasneen went on, raising her voice.
“OH MY GOD THIS IS A FUCKING LIBRARY,” shouted the same girl as before.
“You shut up though with your screaming,” said a boy’s voice from further away.
“And my brother is being totally creepy to her and all that and he’s like ‘well it’s because she’s a slag that she’s here isn’t it’, and I was like no it’s because she’s a lesbian and her dad is a moron and then Aliyaah was like you shouldn’t have told him I was a lesbian he’s going to tell everyone now,” Tasneen went on, drawing breath. “So they’re all dicks and I’m just going to live in the fucking library forever.”
“That,” said Ben, “is shitty.”
“Yeah, no joke,” said Tasneen, still ruffled. “And that bitch over the other side of the bookshelves is hoarding the books I need.”
Thoroughly spooked, Ben elected to be ill again the next day, emailed Kyle to this effect, and got a curt reply regarding his attendance which made him feel so sick he was conversely convinced that he’d done the right thing in crying off after all.
He spent the morning sorting through his notes, recordings, and unfinished assignments without actually doing anything useful with them, and with the foresight to remove himself to the coffee shop he didn’t even have the presence of an insistently invasive cat to blame for it.
He fell back into the habit of checking his emails every five minutes in case something happened, and then ignoring most of the emails he got because they weren’t the thing that he wanted to happen; Ben wasn’t sure, exactly, what he was expecting, but nothing he heard before lunchtime was it.
Around twelve he got an email from Natalya, which electrified him into action. This, he thought, scrambling upright from the slump the leather chair had inflicted on him, this was what he had been waiting for after all.
To: Ben M; Khoo, Daniel
CC: Dr Bill Greenhill
From: Yagoda, Natalya
Subj: bloods for hpa 2
Bill has procured a second set of samples (two second sets I should say, one is now in storage in his surgery) for testing. I will take them to HPA myself but it occurs to me that it would be sensible to take observers for this. Bill is due to speak at Broadcasting House this afternoon so I appeal to you Daniel to come and ensure that the process is observed as having taken place accurately, Ben to cover any journalistic aspect, as people who are not employees of HPA and subordinates of mine. I do not distrust my team but I am aware that they may be accused of lying on my behalf in future and I wish to spare them this.
If you are both amenable I will collect you myself.
It was less investigative journalism, Ben thought, and more tag-along journalism. Natalya seemed to have a much better idea than he did about what would and wouldn’t be necessary, and he wondered if she’d ever read bloody McNae’s. She had probably finished it.
Mindful of the last lecture he’d received, and forgetting that he was supposed to be home in bed with a relapsed lurgy, Ben hastily wrote:
To: Sherazi,
M A
From: Ben M
Subj: Investigative journalism
I’ve been invited up to HPA by Dr Y for the purposes of observing her blood testing procedure to make sure someone knows it went off without a hitch, and I’m not a hundred percent convinced of its legality, should I be doing this?
He finished his latte, drummed his fingers across the edge of the keyboard for a moment, tapped both his feet impatiently, waited for the song on the café radio to end, gave up before the last bars, and replied to Natalya regardless:
To: Yagoda, Natalya
From: Ben M
Subj: re: bloods for HPA 2
I’m game. Where do you want to collect me from?
At the last minute he remembered to copy in Daniel and Dr Bill, and went back to tapping his feet and fingers alternately with the nervous energy of a madman.
“Could you maybe stop that, please,” asked the man sitting opposite him.
Ben looked up, startled, at someone who looked like the mirror image of what Ben was usually aiming, and failing, to look like: down to the moustache he’d been unable so far to grow, the hair that actually stayed in place, the shirt that fitted around the neck, and the rolled up shirt-sleeves that weren’t covered in spilled coffee.
“Sorry,” said Ben, and went back to tapping until Natalya replied with a location. He picked up his Macbook, folded it into his bag, grimaced at the doppelganger of his sartorial ambitions, and left, knocking over the man’s coffee in the process.
“Hey,” shouted the moustached man after him, but Ben affected not to hear, and made his escape.
“How old is this car?” Daniel asked, when he got into it on Whitfield Street, wearing his UCLH pass around his neck.
“Older than you,” Natalya said, with a thin smile. “I advise the use of door handles as back seat is not equipped with seatbelts.”
“Ben,” said Daniel, very seriously. “I think we should swap seats.”
“Absolutely not,” said Ben. “There’s a cooler full of well-packed blood samples in the boot and you’re the scientist.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” said Daniel. “Oh no, wait, Lordes just looked out of the window, I haven’t changed my mind at all,” he tapped on the back of Natalya’s seat in a way that would have earned him a slap from, say, anyone Ben knew who could drive. “Drive, Dr Yagoda, before my supervisor comes out and keeps us here all day being a jumped-up admin manager—”
The car lurched away, settled into a more consistent speed, and made a sound like a bear clearing its throat.
“So still no sign of the first batch?” Daniel asked, as they turned down a side-road.
“No,” said Ben, as Natalya was engaged in trying to make sense of Bloomsbury’s labyrinthine one-way system. “Apparently nothing anywhere on the system.”
“It could just be an error,” Daniel pointed out. “I mean, it’s a very coincidental error but we can’t rule out an error.”
“Yes,” Natalya said, hitting the indicator stick hard enough to nearly knock it out, “this possibility also exists.”
Neither of them sounded as if they’d convinced themselves.
At the car park, the guard by the gate let them in after a cursory glance at Natalya’s ID and didn’t question the presence of two other people in the car. She looked bored, had an iPod headphone in one ear for the entire brief interaction, and Ben could see through the window of her office both a tiny space heater and a Kindle.
The job seemed oddly peaceful.
Parked, and ejected back into freezing wind spotted with equally freezing rain, Natalya opened the boot and removed a medical cooler from its position securely braced with tape, bars, and assorted boot crap. It didn’t look as if it had moved at all throughout the journey.
“I cannot ask you to carry this,” Natalya acknowledged, “one of you please lock the boot.”
Ben seriously doubted that anyone would attempt to either steal her car or steal from her car unless they were on the look-out for scrap metal, but he did as he was told, and held onto her car keys until she had settled the cooler at the end of her arm.
“It feels weirdly like going into school during the middle of the day,” Daniel said, as they approached the door.
The security guard at the reception belonged to a different company to the car park security guard. He was around a foot and a half taller. He did not have a Kindle, and he gave Natalya’s ID more than a mere cursory going over: he took it out of her hand and passed it through a scanner.
“You’re on medical leave,” he said, handing it back to her. “Can’t let you in.”
“I’m on flexible leave,” said Natalya patiently. “It is up to me whether I feel well enough to come in, and this is urgent.”
“You’re still on leave,” said the security guard, without apology.
“I still work here,” Natalya pointed out.
“I know you work here,” said the security guard in frosty tones. “You’re on the system. If you weren’t I’d be calling the police. But I can’t let you in.”
“You can,” said Natalya, “and you will please do so or I will speak to your supervisor.”
The security guard stared at her for a minute, snatched the ID out of her hand, and scanned it a second time. “Alright,” he said, as if the second scanning had made any difference whatsoever, “but you can’t sign anyone in, so these two are going to have to wait here.”
Natalya sighed very heavily, put down the cooler — Daniel took a step back from it — and removed her phone. She turned her back on the security guard.
“David, hello. Yes, I’m here, I have the second set of samples and some observers. Carlson is being difficult about the observers, can you sign them in?”
“It’s the rules,” said the security guard from behind her, “you’re on leave and I’ve been told—”
“Thank you,” said Natalya, and hung up.
They waited by the reception desk for nearly ten minutes, and the room on the far side of the reception opened.
A white man with nearly-white hair who didn’t look significantly older than Ben crept in apologetically. He wore jogging bottoms, grey trainers, and a t-shirt that proclaimed him KING OF SPEEDWAY. “Sorry,” he said, “had to change. Who am I signing in?”
“Ben Martin,” Ben said, raising a hand.
“Dr Daniel Khoo,” said Daniel, not raising his. “David Hepworth?”
“Yes?” said apparently-David, coming to the desk to sign for them like packages. He didn’t seem nervous, especially, only very quiet and very intent.
“What, really?” Daniel persisted, as the security guard scowled and Natalya picked up the cooler again, very carefully.
“That’s me,” confirmed David. “And you’re Daniel Khoo.”
“I know,” said Daniel, with a frown.
They went through the door at the far side of reception. There lay before them a largely featureless corridor topped by a very much more imposingly secure door.
“Um?” Ben asked.
Ben looked from Daniel to David with a bewildered expression, until Daniel took pity on him.
“David was an editor on my PhD,” he said, overtaking him. “Welcome to virology. It is very incestuous.”
“Technically,” said David, leading the way with Natalya. “You’re now trespassing.”
“Oh,” said Ben faintly. “Good.”
“And reporting on pretty much anything in here is going to result in a prison sentence,” David added, without malice.
“Great?” Ben suggested, feeling his guts wither. “And this doesn’t bother you—?”
“If Natalya thinks it’s a good idea,” said David, who was at least six inches shorter than his boss and completely devoid of any kind of concern on the matter, “then I’m okay.”
He put his hand on the more imposing-looking door, held up his security pass, and said, “You ready?”
“Er,” said Ben.
“It’s not going to be a BSL-4 lab, y
ou idiot,” Daniel said, elbowing him. “You’d need to go through decontamination first.”
David swiped his security pass, put in a code, and then, to Ben’s horror, put his eye to a small window next to the door. He pushed, and the door opened smoothly.
“Retinal scanner,” David explained. “All this incredible security tech to stop any unwanted leaks of hot material and look—” he put his toe against the door and held it open for them all to file past, “you can just prop the door open with a door stop.”
They came through to a wide bay with a door at the far end and a huge, triple-glazed window in the wall to their right. Daniel peered through the glass. “That’s it?”
“That’s Group Four lab,” said David.
Natalya said, “We get all the exciting toys,” with a straight face. “Photographing the procedure in here is entirely illegal,” she added, “please do not let anyone see you doing it.”
She hoisted the cooler, nodded to David, and followed him out through the other door, leaving Ben and Daniel alone by the observation window.
“She’s gone to decontaminate and get suited up,” said Daniel, who appeared to be a lot more excited than Ben felt.
“Have you ever been in a—” Ben began.
“BSL-4 lab? No.” Daniel peered through the glass again, “you need every vaccination under the sun and I had a shitty reaction to a couple of them so I’m forever stuck with BSL-2 and below. I’m pushing my luck even to do borna.” He shaded his gaze on the glass with his hand and began naming machines Ben had never heard of.
Ben inched up next to him and put his face against the outermost layer of glass too. He shaded his own gaze, and was surprised to see someone already inside — shorter than David or Natalya, and wearing a kind of blue space-suit filled with air, with a bubble on top. Inside the square plastic bubble he could see a woman’s head, although so indistinctly that all he could be sure of was that she was not Natalya.
Ben watched her for a while, but as he couldn’t work out what she was doing he lost interest. A little later, a door on the left of where he was standing opened, a fine mist of something entered, and Natalya — but not David — came into the room with the cooler.
The Next Big One Page 15